1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording and reproducing device and a recording and reproducing method for recording and reproducing video and audio signals in the DV format in a disk recording medium such as a hard disc.
2. Description of the Related Art
VCRs having built-in cameras have been in widespread use as recording and reproducing devices for recording and reproducing video and audio signals in the DV format. Since video signals are compressed by an intra-frame encoding scheme in video and audio signals in accordance with this DV format, it is easy to make editing the respective frames. For the meantime, however, the information compression efficiency is low so that the resulting data amount per unit time tends to be large.
On the other hand, hard disk recorders and DVD recorders making use of a disk recording medium such as a hard disk, an optical disc and the like have been widely used as devices for recording and reproducing video and audio signals which are encoded and compressed in accordance with the MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) scheme. The video and audio signals in the MPEG format have been processed by an inter-frame compression encoding scheme and therefore the information compression efficiency is high resulting in a smaller data amount per-unit time. Accordingly, in most of stationary type recording and reproducing devices designed for recording and reproducing broadcast programs at home, the MPEG format is employed as a scheme for compressing and encoding video and audio signals.
In this manner, at the present, while the DV format has prevailed for recording and reproducing video and audio signals in video cameras, the MPEG format has prevailed for recording and reproducing video and audio signals in stationary type recording and reproducing devices. There are increasing demands for the ability to make use of a stationary recording and reproducing device for reproducing video and audio signals which are recorded by a video camera and copied to a stationary recording and reproducing device, and the ability to edit those video and audio signals by making use of the stationary recording and reproducing device.
In order to meet the demands, there are emerging stationary recording and reproducing devices capable of converting video and audio signals transmitted from a video camera through a digital interface such as IEEE1394 into corresponding video and audio signals in the MPEG format for recording, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Published Application No. 2001-94921.
Nevertheless, in the case where video and audio signals in the DV format are converted into video and audio signals in the MPEG format, while the storage capacity required for recording the video and audio signals can be saved, there is a problem that it is difficult to edit the video and audio signals in frame and impossible to perform a postrecording process.
Contrary to this, it can be considered to record a DIF stream without conversion of video and audio signals, which are transmitted from a video camera in the DV format, into video and audio signals in the MPEG format. However, the data structure of video and audio signals in the form of a DIF stream is not optimized for recoding on a disc, and therefore there is a problem that it is impossible to uniformly manage the system information, resulting in complicated processes when performing a postrecording process and so forth.